Sunday, April 19, 2015

Yiddish Dictionary/Translate in Browser

Yiddish Dictionary/Translate Bookmarklets and links: There are a number of excellent Yiddish/English dictionaries/translation utilities online. You may find you that you prefer one or the other or you may find that you use several of them. Try them out and see which ones you prefer. I've created bookmarklets that make it easier to pre-populate the search dialogs for several of these. Just drag each of these (or, whichever ones you choose to use) to your browser's bookmarks bar and read the descriptions/instructions.


The following 3 bookmarklets translate from English to Yiddish, Transliterated Yiddish (e.g. - Latin characters) to English, and Yiddish (Hebrew characters) to English using the Yiddish Dictionary Online web site for the translations. If you select a word on any web page before pressing these bookmarklets, the selection dialog will be pre-populated with the word you selected.
  1. en->yi
  2. yi(lat)->en
  3. yi->en
    Sample results for "family":

The following bookmarklet lets you input English, Transliterated Yiddish (Latin characters), or Yiddish (Hebrew characters) and it will bring up a list of multiple possible definitions for the word (displayed as transliterated Yiddish) using Refoyl Finkel's dictionary search utility. This utility is particularly useful if you know only a fragment of a word or don't know the correct spelling as it will try to determine many reasonable choices. If you select a word on any web page before pressing this bookmarklet, the selection dialog will be pre-populated with the word you selected.
  • Refoyl
    Sample results for "family":

The following bookmarklet is a shortcut to Google Translate which preselects translation from English to Yiddish. If you select a word on any web page before pressing this bookmarklet, the selection dialog will be pre-populated with the word you selected.
  • Google
    Sample results for "family":

The following bookmarklet is a shortcut to the online version of the Medem (Niborsky) Yiddish-English, Yiddish-French dictionary. If you select a word on any web page before pressing this bookmarklet, the selection dialog will be pre-populated with the word you selected. You need to specify whether you're translating from or to Yiddish and whether you want translations in English or French. Optionally, you can also have Transliterated Yiddish displayed. You need to setup an account first in order to use the utility. Initially, you get 20 word lookups for free with an additional 5 word lookups for free each month. For a small fee, you can purchase additional word lookups. For casual use, you may prefer to use one of the free alternatives on this page; however, for professional use, the Niborsky dictionary is probably one of the most highly-rated and many Yiddishists consider it extremely valuable.
  • Medem
    Sample results for "family":

The following link is a shortcut to another utility created by Refoyl Finkel (who also created the dictionary search utility listed earlier on this page). This isn't a dictionary lookup utility but serves an analogous purpose. It lets you paste Yiddish text into a dialog (or select a file to upload) and it then creates an HTML page which it "glosses" (e.g. - adds English translations) to every word it recognizes from the Yiddish text you uploaded (similar to what The Forward does with Yiddish words in it's online Yiddish newspaper). This is quite nifty as it allows you to get word help on any Yiddish word in the text by just clicking on it! As an added bonus, it also automatically corrects (according to current YIVO standards) any incorrect nekudes in the text!

The following link is a shortcut to a page that indexes individual PDF pages of "Harkavy's Yiddish-English (6th edition), English-Yiddish (11th edition) Dictionary (1910)" (a popular Yiddish dictionary at the beginning of the 20th Century). It was also created by Refoyl Finkel (who created the dictionary search and glosser utilities listed earlier on this page) and one of his students. It's useful for quickly getting to the correct page in the PDF document when looking for a particular word.
The following link is a shortcut to a PDF version of Uriel Weinreich's Hebrew/English Dictionary (1968) (probably the most popular Yiddish dictionary in common use today). Unlike most PDF Yiddish dictionaries, this one allows you to search for words within the PDF document. It's very worthwhile to download the PDF and use a local copy of it but you can also use it online.
The following bookmarklet lets you input Yiddish (Hebrew characters) and it will bring up a list of all matches of the entered text in the Complete Works of Sholem Aleichem (the site was created by Refoyl Finkel). This utility is very useful if you want to see sample usages of the entered word in Yiddish texts. If you select a word on any web page before pressing this bookmarklet, the selection dialog will be pre-populated with the word you selected.
Lastly, some related material:

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